Jennifer Vanderpool is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles. In her work "there is a chipper cynicism to the retro character of the figures, buildings, fashions, and patterns, so that there is certainly a sense of tradition, yet there is also a sense of transference and surrealism."
Career
In 2007, the Statens Kunstfond: Danish Arts Council awarded Vanderpool an artist grant for her exhibition Once Upon a Tart at RACA in Copenhagen, Denmark. Two years prior the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts awarded funding for Vanderpool's site specific installation in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Vanderpool created a series of molds as part of an installation for Virserums Konsthall titled Blomster in Virserum, Sweden in 2009; "Vanderpool uses the sculptural installation as a site where gender, sex, and food overlap in a curious play between aversion and craving, over-indulgence and restraint."
In 2010, the Kulturrådet: Swedish Arts Council awarded Vanderpool's exhibition Sagoberättelser at Designarkivet, Nybro, Sweden an International Cultural Grant, while Malmö Stad awarded her a cultural grant for her exhibition förgyllda trädgårda. That same year the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, City of Los Angeles and Durfee Foundation awarded Vanderpool a grant for exhibitions that took place in Los Angeles and Bogotá, Colombia.
Her 2011 exhibition Wanton at the Galería Sextante in Bogotá, Colombia featured a variety of intricately designed sculptural and photographic works where "her ultra-baroque sensibility offers viewers a surfeit of visual and emotional pleasures, nothing is squandered."
Vanderpool created an installation in 2012 for the Butler Institute of American Art titled Hometown Story: Youngstown Steel Kitchens. The exhibition incorporated film and advertisements which addressed nostalgia, domesticity and gender roles.
In 2013, Vanderpool exhibited Family Stories/Сімейні Оповідання at Faina Gallery | Dmitry Futerman Gallery in conjunction with Kroshytskyi Art Museum, in Sevastopol, Crimea, Ukraine.
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art included Vanderpool on their Best Artists List of 2013.
In 2014, she exhibited "Super Natural" at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow, Russia. The exhibition included 26 digital postcards and two multichannel video works which "invite each viewer to investigate their beliefs about places and the people in them, using beauty as a guise to expose the facts behind the facade."
Vanderpool has served as a panelist for Plan B at the 24th International Sculpture Conference: Sculpture, Culture, & Community in New Orleans and for a symposium, Collecting Geographies: Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art, in 2014 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
In 2016, Vanderpool curated an exhibition titled "Imaginary Selves" at the Harris Gallery at University of La Verne in La Verne, California. The exhibition included works from Lisa Jevbratt, Jane Callister, Việt Lê, Brian McArthur, Catalina Jaramillo Quijano, and James Van Arsdale which explored notions of self through multiple modalities including race, genealogy, and music.
Pitzer College Art Galleries in Claremont, California received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2016 to exhibit A Moderate Proposal co-curated by Pitzer College Art Galleries Director/Curator Ciara Ennis and artist Jennifer Vanderpool.
Vanderpool exhibited Piter as a part of the Wende Museum and Cold War Archive's Artistic Interpretations of the Cold War in Culver City, California beginning in April 2016 alongside artists Farrah Karapetian, Richtje Reinsma and Daphne Rosenthal. Piter included 4 large-scale digital prints, 5 posters hung salon style with works from the Wende Museum's collection, a projected video and an interview with a Los Angeles resident who moved to the US after living in Soviet Union.
Vanderpool co-curated with Việt Lê Love in a Time of War at SF Camerawork in San Francisco, California which "demonstrates as love and war police bodies, there’s code-breaking and brinksmanship. The show is abound with subtle insertions and unknown histories, as well as humor and beauty."
She exhibited 5 videos as a part of the M.A.R.S. (Music & Arts ReSound) Festival in Los Angeles, California during April 2017.
Vanderpool exhibited a video from Super Natural, 2014–17 in Twenty/20, a month long film exhibition held by Edward Cella Art + Architecture in Los Angeles, California, each day featured a different artist's video playing on loop from the time the gallery opened to the time it closed.